Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment

8 / Being the Breast, Being Without: Philip Roth, Matuschka, and Deena Metzger

8 / Being the Breast, Being Without Philip Roth, Matuschka, and Deena Metzger The mythology of the breast at any given time, in any given culture, necessarily consists of layers of meaning, accreted and reorganized over decades, the inherited material for the representation of powerful, often pre-Oedipal desires and anxieties. For the most part, the Western tradition seems to regard the breast as a stable signifier of the feminine, though subject to the vicissitudes of historical change: the story of the breast as told by Marilyn Yalom.1 At times and in places, however, the breast cuts loose from the strictures of sex and gender, asserts itself and its materiality as a signifier to rival the phallus, and shows how a world might be reorganized around itself. Whereas, at the outset of this study, the notion of men with breasts and women without—neatly represented by the conjunction of Jared Diamond’s article on lactating fathers and Bev Francis’s disappearing breast, and compactly by Simon Perelstein and Jeannette Apfel in Rainer Kaufmann’s The Most Beautiful Bosom in the World (see the introduction to this volume)—seemed the most provocative and elegant formulation of such a reorganization, we have 248 now arrived, through a process of closely reading a number of breastobsessed texts of the German eighteenth century, at a more dialectical and more urgent formulation patterned on being the breast and being without. As we look back at Bev Francis, St. Agatha, Fanny Burney, and Therese Huber, it becomes clear that being without the breast is a particularly powerful way of having the breast, precisely because the breast so figured evinces the presence of lack—the most originary meaning of breast, as Jacob Grimm put it. Obviously, this formulation mimics the Lacanian gender logic of having and being the phallus. As a result, it may be vulnerable to the criticism of involving nothing more than substituting the breast for the phallus , the mother for the father—a charge often leveled at Melanie Klein.2 I hope it has become clear, over the course of the preceding chapters, that more is involved. For one thing, the interchangeability of the breast and the penis, the fungibility of their respective fluids, and the question of whether the breast is like a penis, or the penis like a breast—that is, the question of which has priority over the other—should qualify any idea that the breast/breasts and the penis/phallus are stable signifiers, however privileged. Hence, at diªerent points, this study of an important episode in the history of the breast has also necessarily become involved in the cultural history of the penis, not only in chapter 3, with its discussions of masturbation and wet-nursing, but also and most especially in chapter 6, on Heinse and Huber. Heinse’s proto-Butlerian subversion of the phallus, in his Petronius project, was a decisive step in raising breast-based fantasy to another level.While the breast-based fantasies ofWieland and La Roche were entertained within what remained, finally, a patriarchal order and were modeled on the idea of the phallic breast, the post-Heinsian fantasies of Huber and Kleist have taken us into new territory. Huber introduced the notion of the breast in ruins, a breast figured by the dialectic of lack and abundance, presence and absence, a sense of having the breast that exceeds the erotic gaze. Kleist, too, explored the meaning of having the breast, but he also took into account the complementary position of being the breast, detached from female sex and gender determination. The eªect on language in Kleist’s play—the eclipse of metaphor by metonymy, the collapse of the distinction between word and act—is the ultimate sign of the subversion of 249 being the breast, being without the patriarchal order. Such an eªect is entirely consistent with our reflections on etymology and puns, on the materiality of language, on concepts of the “dream screen” and the breast, and on Judith Butler’s queer politics.3 Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some two hundred years and more since German writers entertained the fantasy of a breastbased culture, we may wonder whether our own culture is at all figured by the reverse Lacanian logic of being and having the breast. The assertion that ours is a breast-obsessed culture on the order of the eighteenth century requires no justification. Breast implants, the politics of...